


Rognons

by oldbosie



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, One-Shot, Warning: Hannibal, non-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:06:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldbosie/pseuds/oldbosie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham's identification with the Chesapeake Ripper as seen in an interaction with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, prior to Graham's internment at Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.</p><p>A study in Hannibal Lecter's capacity to fear, and the consequences of its suppression.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rognons

**Author's Note:**

> Circumstantial experimentation rather than slash. Sorry.

Hannibal’s blue maculations, the cowrie letters paled across his cheeks, contracted and compressed like Hell’s cold hands upon St. Peter’s sheets. He seemed old, seemed carved of wax, coaxed at knifepoint from the flesh of a single pearl and callused as the oyster’s horn-backed shell. Weariness stumbled through the laugh lines wound around his eyes. He had always looked so very kind, and spoken so very coolly. The oily voice now curdled like cream, and cracked. White he was too, now, beneath his sheer oleic gold.

“Dr. Lecter?” Will had not intended interruption, but sensed his trespass disregarded. Horror had spilled its slimy breath in great wet gusts across his back, left him with tremors and fingers fisted up with all the clammy force of Lecter’s lines.

“I’m all ears, Will.” The invitation to speak came out unpleasantly. It was clenched between the mandibles of a humorless leer. Not even Hannibal could contort the tractable face of their silence into something more sincere. He knew what was coming, as Will knew he often did.

Will Graham feared to break a jaw on what words he dared to speak. They shook themselves loose of his teeth and tumbled, sank beneath the murk and mire about their ankles. Leeches, he thought, and balked.

Scarlet threads were crawling through the rug.

“I was thinking,” he said, with the parched and sticky clicking of one syllable upon the other that marked his most neurotic phrases, “if you could lend me—some, ah— _additional insight_ as to the particular methods of this—”

Hannibal, who had recovered his silvered gentillesse, regarded Will with blackened cervine eyes. Will flinched again and sought his knees.

“That particular responsibility has generally fallen to you of late, hasn’t it?”

Will flicked his eyelids as the floor and addressed his hands as if offering them reply. He felt the film of the fortnight clinging. Brow, back, shoulders, thighs. Palms, gleaming.

“No,” he forced through teeth that might well have chattered with near febrile disassociation. “No, doctor, my insights pertain to the mind, the manner, the motive. The _method_ , this time—”

Lecter’s soapstone countenance retracted from the curvature of its new creases. He looked like an ill man in an office meeting who dared not rise.

“I’m not altogether sure what I can contribute, Will. I don’t know this ripper. I haven’t attended the crime scenes, except in pictures—”

Will accepted the offer of a second interruption.

“Our ripper is a surgeon, Dr. Lecter. Or he was, I don’t know. Maybe he was never a surgeon—maybe he was a butcher, a biologist. But he knows the human body, and he is able to meet it with the hand of a god. I can see what he sees, I can—” Words turned to water in the mouths of the drowning. “I can _feel what he feels_...But I never knew what he knows. I haven’t his skill.”

The heaven-and-hell glimmer of comprehension had dissipated entirely from Lecter’s eyes, the liquid inkling of a soul. He sat, inanimate, _I am in Death_ , like the caiman in the paralytic sun. Will Graham, who avoided eyes, did not see.

“ _You,_ ” he told his fingers, “have. If you could provide me with this piece, this one last thing, I’d have the picture. All of it.”

Hannibal’s face became once more receptive to light. His eyes briefly labored to tick from side to side, sluggish from their staring but again, at last, alive.

“Both of us know you would become the picture, should you acquire that kind of intimacy with it in its entirety. Do you think, Will, that you wish to be so close?”

The doctor prised himself from his seat with the sinuous tug of a far older man. A decanter flashed in his hand, cut-glass whitely tipping, purging. He poured out two. Crystal, Will noted, the cup’s abrasive lip a vocal organ of its own that winked and whirred beneath the touch. He didn’t answer. He felt no need.

“I don’t,” said Lecter, alighting palely on the armchair’s precipice.

Will shook the aimless loathing from his back and filled his throat.

“It doesn’t matter anymore. If I get close, I catch him. I don’t have to care what else I catch. No one expects me to.”

Hannibal observed the spite through steepled fingers, and his words were sharp.

“I do. I care, and I expect you to do the same. And what of Dr. Bloom? She cares deeply. She finds your disregard for your own well-being frustrating.”

Will lowered his glass and scraped at the granular coarseness of a derelict cheek.

“Alana—? Well, that’s nothing new, I guess.” He peered into the port that sent his face up faintly from its moony depths. Wine, in dim apartments, looked quite black. He coughed. “I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t really be drinking this—” The aspirin had faded him. He felt as Hannibal looked—diaphanous and blanched. Perhaps it was the hour.

“I’ll show you what I know,” said Hannibal, pointedly, with the air of someone letting a thing go to honor a guest, “briefly. With regards to the more clinically-informed behavior of this ripper. You understand that you will have to remind me of his accomplishments.”

“Show me?” Will, tersely. The doctor’s cold, apologetic laugh was blessed. _Je me trompe_.

“Rather, you will show me, as I provide instruction.” His smile was the ice that clattered in the glass, clattered on the very taut viscosity of the air. He cupped his chair in taste-beringed and taste-roughened hands that did not tremble, as though to rise, but a notion burst theatrically on a brow that did not crumple, did not bow without a bloom of choreography. “Ah—my letter opener on that bureau, an old cedar one, can you see?”

Will craned his neck and felt its wrappings fold across his bones. A varnished instrument, sand-softened into frail luminescence, an unforgivable susceptibility to light, lay delicately between broken seals and annotated timetables. What illuminated it, it gradually became with docile radiance—it gauzed itself in lamplight. Reflection was not what took place on its contrived, ornately riddled skin.

“That?” said Will, though he knew just what it was. “It’s pretty.” He found it horrific. Something that not only mirrored but emulated—and all because of a particular lacquer, a particular finishing method or carving technique or sandpaper grain. Hannibal permitted himself a narrow smile.

“It used to be a countertop. Its life in my kitchen was fleeting—the meat began to taste of gin. The wood was exquisite, however. I repurposed it. Would you mind...?” His supple limbs unfolded with horrible cacophony, like the blanching virtuoso on an untuned violin. His hands would never tremble, ever firm in loving memory of the trade that lay disused among the roses—but his body cried mercy, fear, foul play. Faltered. He chastised it with the unerring level of his hands: straightened his tie, tugged his linen jacket smooth. He did this as Will became two shoulders rowing through a blue-checked shirt, the sort of eyeless complicity that was a turned back. Will returned without his eyes, too, examining the dark motifs impressed upon the artifact before he found the doctor’s face. When this was done, he shook the paper knife by its blade.

“You did this?”

Lecter nodded and spread his arms until the jacket’s fastening sidled toward his breast. Then they descended, writhing as they liberated tightly-pursed buttons, disassembling the cogent three-piece suit. He was himself a tradition, wearing a white A-shirt under all, like a young soldier, lithe and starrily devoted to his cause.

“I trust you know the orientation of the abdominal organs?”

“Approximately.” Will’s face was the driftwood smile, sun-blighted and borer-furrowed agony of contrite humiliation. The smile that had abraded from the lips some time ago, and leapt to streak with chapping paint the moldered faces of suffer, sorry, simper. It was less a smile than the toothy supplication seen in weaker wolves, wolves with blood on their wet beetle noses and victors glowering over their backs. Hannibal saw this ugly deference and thought it unseeming for a nice boy like Will Graham. Will was not lesser, needn’t grimace and show his teeth. He had learned submission at the hands of alphas like Jack Crawford, of yowling packs like gun-crowded, coffee-jaundiced briefing rooms. It was ugly to Hannibal Lecter that horror and disgust should make servility of greatness. Look what it had made of him. He gave Will a moment to dispense with the false, fissured smile before he spoke.

“Come over to the right side, please.”

Hannibal’s imposing breadth threatened collapse in Will’s absolute centrifuge of pacing. Anxiety was pointedly clearing its throat.

“The right side, Will.” Lecter gestured with the steady cadence of his hand. Will coaxed his feet from restlessness to stand in Lecter’s ranging shadow. He still held the tender weapon by its blade, as if, point out, it would smite the doctor of its own accord. He held it like a handler of beasts, fingers locked over fatal lips. Hannibal did not smile, but prised it gently from Will’s hands and replaced it, handle in.

And Will was the tailor and here was a coat beyond repair. It palpitated on the hanger’s limbs, flat without the fit of a wearer—delightlessly, hideously, rudely laced together by a tasteless craftsman. Garish florets hemmed into the sleeves, colors and weaves ill-suited to one another, specious nuances of style made ugly by mere multitudes. A soiled handkerchief, perhaps, disregarded in its breast—no consideration, no semblance of propriety, no will whatsoever. Nasty thing, he thought with livid sorrow. Lividly, the tailor sought his shears. That pocket there, that may be put to splendid use, and this set of buttons for a dinner jacket—! Won’t it shame the maker to see his work made lovelier—?

He murmured instruction to himself in a vaguely unknown voice, an alien lisp and drawl.

Feel my side here, said the coat in the tailor’s voice. Good, now find the lowermost rib. Sight ten inches along the side there...and take! Take now! Take! _The wolf, gaunt with the famished craving, lodged ever in her horrible lean flank..._

But, as the brightness of lucidity returned amid a night’s inebriated smear, broad hands—ceaselessly steady hands, with every touch an immaculate design, cuffed Will’s shoulders.

“Are you with me, now?”

There was red. Will’s stomach flew in exultation toward his throat, where it remained, throbbing like a secondary heart, occluding the organ of speech and sweeping sickness through gnarled, through smiling teeth.

Again. Will’s stomach sank and crumpled, horror involute. His hands unclenched. Hannibal sat heavily and sighed. “Are you with me now, Will?” Jaw convulsed in cheek. “Yes.” Not much red, but enough. The letter knife took on new illumination. Free of the lamp’s warm reaches, the wood blushed in shadow. Red with its maker, sleeping on the floor. Palms, gleaming.

Hannibal’s eyelids dithered, blue like dampened newsprint—it was what they called wincing, and it was brought on by things like pain.

“I have to say,” he said, “I am impressed. Most surgeons require a scalpel for their primary incision.” He had not restored his waistcoat to his side. The blade had breached the lowermost rib and ducked raggedly into the beginnings of a waist. A mark of speed, a failure of precision. It must have been pure force, pure spontaneity.

Will ached to run. Panic pulled the darkness tight around his eyes. Hannibal, wincing, must have seen.

“Don’t leave, Will. You’ll have to help me. I’ll take care of you. Sit—go on. Take all the time you need. But stay.”

Will’s pupils flexed to find any bright spot of clarity, any focal point at all. He sat and held the bloodied armchair in his gaze. He kneaded the upholstery with unseeing eyes, prayed for answers sealed like tumid nodes beneath its skin. Hannibal had staunched himself and was wringing his A-shirt in the kitchen sink. He did not return to the sitting room until a fresh white tee had slipped atop the gauzy wound. His hand staved off the bleeding from the undefiled new cotton.

“Can you help me now, Will?”

Will nodded.

Hannibal unlaced a heavy box, hoary with disuse. The utensils were exhumed as if from a musician’s case, velvet-backed shrouds and leather integuments. Will knew these things. Pins, forceps, pliers. It might have been his fly-making kit. They glittered darkly and razed their cowhide sheathings with a glare that needled Will’s raw eyes.

Hannibal slipped a line of suture thread from its tidy spool.

“Do you know the surgeon’s knot?”

“You said you’d take care of me.”

“I am. But you must help me. Tell me about yourself. Stay with me.”

Hannibal numbed himself. The skin bloated gorily with lidocaine.

“I like fixing boat motors.”

“Fix something else, for a change.”

Surgeon’s knot. Subcuticular stitch. Like eyelashes in Hannibal Lecter.

“I make flies. For fishing.”

“Do you fish?”

“I did.”

The needle rocked and hooked. Will’s finger slipped, unnoticed. Blood beaded blackly.

“Trout.”

Hannibal thumbed the bloodied hip with interest.

“I keep dogs. Strays. Small one hides under the house. The others brought him to my doormat when he was tiny. I looked for an owner, a bitch, someone who put out bones at night, anything. Looked, that time.”

“You don’t look, ordinarily?”

Surgeon’s knot. Scissors.

“No, I suppose I don’t. Like thinking they’ve got no one else, maybe.”

He blinked and fished his glasses from his coat. They were cold, and bloomed whitely in his breath. The swollen laceration he had painted had been smiling. With the lenses, it receded meekly. Will interred another stitch. When it was done, he sat on his heels. His throat peeled, dry, from vocal cords abused by honest speech and searing concentration.

“Hungry, Will?” I made myself too much last night, he said.

Will didn’t ask how Hannibal had known.


End file.
